At the National Civil Rights Museum, there’s always a moment that gets you. Maybe more than one. Probably more than one. But always at least one.

The ascending walkway to the glass-enclosed Room 306, where Martin Luther King Jr. spent his last night, and the balcony where he spent his last moment, is pretty much designed to do this. The line slows down, because it’s the one thing in a museum overflowing with points of interest to which every visitor will attend. Behind you, on a video, a short documentary on King’s final visit to Memphis plays, and at some point as you snake your way along the wall, the “Mountaintop” speech will catch you, and you may be undone.

I’ve had that experience before. What got me this time was an exchange, recounted on one of the museum's wall panels, between John Seigenthaler, an assistant to then Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and Diane Nash, a 22-year-old college student helping organize the Freedom Rides, which challenged state segregation of interstate buses and facilities:

Nash [after a pause]: “Sir, you should know we all signed our last wills and testaments last night.”

The Federal government was managing a “problem.” Nash and everyone on the Freedom Rides and everyone who stepped forward in other parts of the movement were fighting for their lives. They were also, even if too many failed to recognize it at the time, fighting for their country.

The quote wasn’t new to me. I’m pretty sure I read it in “Parting the Waters,” the first of Taylor Branch’s three-book epic on King and the movement. I definitely encountered it in “Freedom Riders,” the exceptional 2011 PBS documentary. But it reached out and grabbed me on this trip.

This day is for Martin Luther King Jr, of course. While the Lorraine Motel was a significant place in black culture, the National Civil Rights Museum would not be there if not for its intersection with King’s assassination. The King story is told there, in stations most Americans understand in a word: Montgomery-Washington-Birmingham-Selma-Memphis. But King was the brightest star in a vast constellation. The movement he was a part of was more than him, as is the museum dedicated to that movement.

I revisited the National Civil Rights Museum over the weekend, taking the full tour for the first time in a year or so. On this visit, given the tenor of the times, a word of thanks to some of the women whose stories, at least partial stories, you can learn there:

Harriet Tubman, who escaped from slavery, and then risked her life to liberate more than a hundred others. Elizabeth Freeman, who heard the promises of the Declaration of Independence and insisted they were meant for her, suing, successfully, to end her own enslavement. Two Memphians, among others: Ida B. Wells, who exposed the horrors of lynching and was run out of town for her work, and Maxine Smith, who fought to integrate the Memphis School Board. Claudette Colvin, who was 15 years old when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, nine months before Rosa Parks. Ella Baker … Ella Baker, one of the too-hidden heroes in all of American life, a grassroots activist on the field more than 20 years before the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and who shepherded in the next generation as godmother to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee . Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper’s daughter who became an SNCC field organizer and shook the nation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. And Diane Nash, sit-in veteran, SNCC co-founder, Freedom Ride organizer, one of the first to the fight in Selma.

Nash and Colvin are still living. Giants walk among us.

A lot of people will visit the National Civil Rights Museum today. But it will be no less enthralling tomorrow or the next day. If you haven’t been, or haven’t been in a while, plan a trip.

Two other thoughts on this latest visit: A renewed appreciation for how crucial relatively recent additions on the slave trade, American slavery, and Jim Crow are to fully understanding this story. This movement didn’t begin in Montgomery or with Thurgood Marshall at the Supreme Court. The museum now gives a sense of the longer struggle, of how the American system of racial oppression was formed and the back-and-forth fight to overcome it from the very beginning.

A second: These stories and the hundreds of others packed into this sacred space are still mostly too little told. It’s hard to get people into museums or to read books or watch documentaries. But our favored modern modes: Movies, television/streaming series, podcasts? All should tap deeper into this material. Every segment of the National Civil Rights Museum should inspire a feature film or series with the richness and heft that Ava DuVernay brought to “Selma.”

Speak On It:

Today, we commemorate my father’s 89th birthday. Beyond sharing #MLK quotes, I pray that our global community, from educators to politicians to artists to law enforcement, will truly hear his voice, follow his teachings and demonstrate his love for humanity. #MLKDay#MLK50Forwardpic.twitter.com/9B7bhiKWzr

If King were alive now, he would be standing w/ DACA & all immigrants. He would challenge a tax reform bill that transferred $2 trillion from the poor to the wealthy. He would be dealing head-on with health care & the resegregation of public schools....

The Grizzlies host the Lakers in their annual MLK Day game, back on the day itself and back on national television. ICYMI, my Friday Pick-and-Pop column offered a Grizzlies fan survival guide for the season's second half, thoughts on today's "I Am a Man"-inspired uniforms and more.

The Fadeout: Speaking of the Freedom Rides, here -- I'm sure not for the first time in this space -- is Chuck Berry's "Promised Land," a sneak Freedom Rides travelogue (there's a reason he chooses to bypass Rock Hill) that blooms into a grander metaphor:

Reach Chris Herrington at chris.herrington@commercialappeal.com or on Twitter at @chrisherrington and @herringtonNBA.